A Midsummer Night's Dream: Shakespeare's Syzygy of Meaning

A Midsummer Night's Dream and its symbolic variants-fiction, fancy, fantasy, or imagination-have no practical value and pragmatic meaning unless and until placed in a Jungian context. In this regard, the mainstream criticism focuses on dream-literature as "escapistic." This study explores Jungian themes in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in such a way as to make it an experience for soul-making. The whole study revolves around the key idea of syzygy, which Jung uses to conceptualize the contra-sexual archetypes/psychic energies as anima in man and animus in woman respectively.